Race in America with Ken Burns & Henry Louis Gates
Gates is a renowned historian, especially esteemed for his research on the lives of African-Americans in the post-Civil War era, including his acclaimed 2019 book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. He has also been the host of PBS' Finding Your Roots series since 2012 and was a SXSW EDU Keynote speaker in 2019. At SXSW 2016, he joined filmmaker Ken Burns and USC professor Dr. Todd Boyd for a discussion about race relations in the wake of the Charlestion church shooting in June 2015.
Ken Burns
Filmmaker, PBS.
Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than 35 years. Since the Academy Award-nominated BROOKLYN BRIDGE in 1981, he has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including the landmark television series THE CIVIL WAR.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
PBS Host, Historian.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty books and created fourteen documentary films. His groundbreaking genealogy series Finding Your Roots returned to PBS for a third season in January 2016. His series Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise will air on PBS in the fall of 2016. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award. The recipient of fifty-five honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He was named to Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997, to Ebony’s Power 150 list in 2009, and to Ebony’s Power 100 list in 2010 and 2012. He earned his B.A. in English Language and Literature, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979.
Todd Boyd
The Katherine & Frank Price Chair for the Study of Race & Popular Culture, USC, School of Cinematic Arts.
Dr. Todd Boyd, aka Notorious Ph.D., is the Katherine and Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race and Popular Culture and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
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